Jane Pronko celebrates the city in new paintings at Main Street Gallery

Jane Pronko’s views of Kansas City render it luminous and slightly mysterious. What sets her apart from so many who tackle the topic is her avoidance of tidying and editing. She resists the pull to prettify that would turn the works picturesque. She opens “Going to Kansas City,” an exhibit of new oil paintings, Friday at the Main Street Gallery.

No one captures a Kansas City street scene — the cars, the buildings, the lights and reflections — like Jane Pronko. And it’s no wonder. She has been doing it for more than 40 years.

Pronko’s views of the city render it luminous and slightly mysterious. What sets her apart from so many who tackle the topic is her avoidance of tidying and editing. She resists the pull to prettify that would turn the works picturesque.

Pronko has recently placed paintings in prominent collections, including St. Luke’s Hospital’s, and is part of the Modern Arts Midtown gallery in Omaha. Yet it has been awhile since she has had a one-person show in Kansas City.

Pronko fans will be pleased to learn they can get their fill Friday, when she opens “Going to Kansas City: New Oil Paintings by Jane Pronko”

at the Main Street Gallery.

The show is all scenes of greater Kansas City, from Southwest Boulevard to Lackman Road.

The signature image, “Crossroads,” offers a view of Anton’s Taproom (where the Main Street Gallery occupies the second floor), looking south down Main Street at night. The piece is classic Pronko, capturing the restaurant’s glowing sign, reflections bouncing off parked cars and the blurry glow of headlights.

Streetlamps descend down the hill, leading the eye to the lighted windows of highrises and the Crown Center elevated crosswalk in the background. With no people on the street, the viewer takes ownership.

The view is actually a composite, worked and reworked from dozens of photographs Pronko took over multiple visits. After sketching the scene on canvas, she paints over the drawing in white, so that only the faintest cues remain.

“I know where I’m going. I have a map. I’ll do three layers in oil paint — I block it in and go in two more times,” she said during a recent studio visit at her Prairie Village home.

In recent years, the city’s renewal and development boom have turned her paintings into unofficial documents.

“Downtown is changing a lot,” she said. “A lot of what I’m painting is gone.”

The area portrayed in “Making It Through the Night,” a view of Southwest Boulevard under the overpass, “has changed totally,” Pronko said. So has the view recorded in “Vanishing,” of an old film industry building on 18th Street, later torn down to make a parking lot.

Pronko grew up in Dupo, Ill., a Missouri-Pacific railroad town just across the river from St. Louis.

“There was no art in the whole town, and art classes weren’t offered at the high school,” she said. “I just started doing it. I was raised Southern Baptist, and I’d sit there and draw people in church.”

Pronko’s earliest works were what she calls “train paintings,” inspired by her everyday experience.

“My father was a switchman,” she said. “He used to ride behind the house and wave.”

But the works confounded her mother, who thought “nice ladies paint flowers and landscapes.”

At the University of Kansas, Pronko majored in physical therapy, but she also took classes in sculpture and ceramics. Although she earned her degree in PT, the lure of art eventually prevailed.

“After I got married and was home with the kids, I studied with Philomene Bennett,” she said. “She was really important to me because she encouraged me so much. I also took classes at Johnson County Community College and KU.”

Pronko also studied for a while with Stanley Lewis, an important influence, at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Her turn to street scenes was sparked by her son-in-law’s Dutch father, who asked her to paint him a scene of New York. After that, she produced dozens of New York paintings, made while visiting a close friend in the city.

Pronko made her first local street scene at the request of The Kansas City Star.

“The Star wanted a street scene of Johnson County,” she said, “so I went to Metcalf and 75th Street. I took pictures and made the painting.”

Working for years in a studio in the River Market, Pronko then began capturing her urban surroundings.